Sitecore announced a number of exciting new releases and product innovations at the Sitecore Symposium 2019. Along with the announcement of a new SaaS offering, Content Hub 3.3 and Sitecore AI, Sitecore announced details of updates included in the Experience Platform (XP) 9.3 release.
This latest release and the direction Sitecore are heading in for their future product innovations has a focus on easy content delivery, better management of content lifecycles and the usability of a ‘modern platform’.
Major Development Areas
- New editing environment: Horizon
- Updates to performance metrics, marketing automation and forms
- Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA)
- Sitecore JavaScript Services (JSS)
- General enhancements
Let's take a closer look at the major changes included in each of these areas.
Horizon
- New editing environment
- Reduces time content authors spend adding information
- Drag and drop, ‘one-click-away’ functionality makes it simple to make changes and modifications
- Ability to simulate visitor experiences and see a visual representation of content on all devices
Improved Performance Metrics
- Performance metric enhancements
- Actionable insights with improved analytics, optimization and testing
- Reach will be replaced with impressions
- Dashboard will contain an overview of all personalization results and tests
Marketing Automation
- Drag and drop features for campaigns and marketing automation
- Improvements to marketing automation scheduling
- New templates for EXM users
Forms
- Headless forms
- Improved bot detection features
- File upload and email confirmation features
- Ability to pass form fields as URL parameters and to publish forms directly from the Forms UI
Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA)
- Improved and faster rendering times
- Updated and faster template engine
- Visual Studio Code extension that offers suggestions and highlights syntax
- Optimized search experience with additional search filter components
- New and improved front-end workflow includes JSS Style theme creation, version controlled theme improvements and full documentation of SXA JavaScript APIs
Sitecore JavaScript Services (JSS)
- Ability to build JSS Apps on your local machine and connect to a remote Sitecore server through a tunnel
- Allows developers working on Macs to perform live-debugs of their JSS app
General Enhancements
- Improvements to Sitecore xConnect, including web tracker and session expiration batching support, as well as new interaction aggregation pipelines that handle batches of interactions
- Improvements to the experience editor including navigation and control bars and Sitecore.Context.PageMode.IsExploring
- Improvements to reporting, including data confidence fixes and conversion rate updates
- Performance improvements, including reducing the number of calls and amount of data saved
Along with these updates, Sitecore AI will be available as an add-on to the Sitecore 9.3 release in December 2019. All information about the Sitecore 9.3 release included in this article was released at the Sitecore Symposium 2019 by Desta Price (Sitecore’s Executive VP of Product Management), and Pieter Brinkman (Sitecore’s Director of Technical Marketing).
We're really excited about the updates included in this release, as well as the other product innovations Sitecore has teased us with. Reach us at [email protected] to find out more about this release, or upgrading to this latest version of Sitecore.
